Weird West
A new perspective on immersive sims
What convinced me Weird West is a true immersive sim had nothing to do with the carefully prepared talking points from a recent 30-minute hands-off demo. It was a small dust devil, a random weather event, whipping through the scene.
While former Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio explains the finesse of the physics system, showing off by tossing a bottle and shooting it out of the air, a better, if less elegant example comes along.
The dust devil skirts around the edge of our bird’s-eye view of a destitute barn and gunslinger protagonist, first picking up some wooden debris, then passing over a campfire. It then transforms into a raging cyclone of flame and despair, a swirling monstrosity carrying a dozen flaming planks which then light the adjacent farmhouse ablaze and send our demoist scrambling out of the way.
Where a bigger team might run into production roadblocks, WolfEye Studio’s smaller team, largely made up of former Arkane talent, and zoomed out perspective allows for higher concept experimentation. For instance, in Weird West, you don’t play one character, you play five of them. Each chapter features a new protagonist with a unique story that permanently affects the world state for the next one, until they all converge into a final chapter together.
Weird West’s expressive verbs are its most exciting features though, unique to this perspective. Players can pick up and throw just about any object. There’s a dedicated kick button, and your kicks do not discriminate—they’ll hurt friend or foe, chicken or cow. Players can also climb around the scenery, stacking barrels to climb fences and general stores, leaping between rooftops and snooping through people’s homes. But as Raph demonstrated, you can also just make your own fun, shooting bottles out of the air or kicking some empty cans around.
WEST WORLD
We see fragments of how it fits into action throughout the demo. Raph’s gunslinger does a MaxPayne- style dive between rooftops. From above, he sneaks around some enemies and kicks a barrel towards them, shooting and igniting it as it makes contact. He climbs a fence into enemy headquarters and uses some rope he finds to climb into a well to find an alternate route in. It’s about as immersive sim as immersive sims get, but with more tornadoes and an odd wrapper.
Much like Fallout2, you move through Weird West via a world map obscured in fog that lifts as you chart your way across it. Physical spaces are discrete, but embarking on journeys between them run a chance of triggering a random encounter, be it a coyote attack or an invitation to a coven’s bloody ritual. Raph takes down a few coyotes, then looks for treasure. Shovels are another important systemic tool in Weird West: You can dig your way out of tricky situations and bury anything, including your dead friends and family.
We’ll get perks in relics and a ton of skills to choose from that build out all sorts of playstyles between characters, but I’m curious to see how it feels and what kind of unique combat and stealth encounters the isometric perspective provides. With Prey fresh in my mind, I have more reasons to believe WolfEye will pull it off than not.
Weird West might be a different looking game for a team composed of developers aimed at acclaimed firstperson immersive sims in the past, but it just might equal them. Weird West looks to be as complex an immersive sim as the best of them. It’s out later this year.
WE’LL GET PERKS IN RELICS AND A TON OF SKILLS TO CHOOSE FROM